Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 028
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Adab, one of the great city-states of ancient southern Iraq, recording two named men assigned to that city. The terse formula 'they are stationed there,' followed by a precative wish and a final delivery or receipt notation, is characteristic of the compact personnel accounting that ran Sumerian institutions in the mid-third millennium BCE. The names Ur-Ninmug ('Servant of Ninmug') and Ur-Šer7-da follow the standard Sumerian devotional naming pattern in which a person is styled as the 'dog/devotee' of a deity or institution. Several lines in the lower half are genuinely difficult to interpret — they may record a commodity, a further place name or professional designation, and a collective receipt formula — and should be treated as tentative readings.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two men are on the books: Ur-Ninmug and Ur-Šer7-da, one of each, assigned to Adab. They are currently stationed there. May this matter be settled. What follows is harder to read confidently: asz11-lum and iritum appear next — probably a commodity, a place name, or a professional designation — and the tablet closes with a notation, marked as plural, that seems to record a receipt or delivery involving multiple parties. The final lines are too archaic or terse to render in full with confidence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 Ur-Ninmug, 1 Ur-Šer7-da — Adab: they are stationed there; may [it] be settled; asz11-lum, iritum — šu-[x]-DU-NI (plural).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) ur-nin-mug 1(asz@c) ur-szer7-da adab i3-durunx(|DUR2.DUR2|)-ne2-esz2 he2-su-be2-a asz11(ASZ@z)-lum i-ri2-tum szu-x-DU-NI-mesz
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC) ?) — CUSAS 35, 028. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P254033) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.